thropic imaginations,
excited and exciting over the horrors of slavery. Although these
pictures were then often accused of being purposely exaggerated, they
seem now to fall short of, instead of surpassing, the truth. Stately
walls, acres of roses, miles of oranges, unmeasured fields of cane,
colossal sugar-house--they were all there, and all the rest of it,
with the slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere, whole villages of negro
cabins. And there were also, most noticeable to the natural, as well
as visionary eye--there were the ease, idleness, extravagance,
self-indulgence, pomp, pride, arrogance, in short the whole
enumeration, the moral _sine qua non_, as some people considered it,
of the wealthy slaveholder of aristocratic descent and tastes.

What Mademoiselle Idalie cared to learn she studied, what she did not
she ignored; and she followed the same simple rule untrammeled in her
eating, drinking, dressing, and comportment generally; and whatever
discipline may have been exercised on the place, either in fact or
fiction, most assuredly none of it, even so much as in a threat, ever
attainted her sacred person. When she was just turned sixteen,
Mademoiselle Idalie made up her mind to go into society. Whether she
was beautiful or not, it is hard to say. It is almost impossible to
appreciate properly the beauty of the rich, the very rich. The
unfettered development, the limitless choice of accessories, the
confidence, the self-esteem, the sureness of expression, the
simplicity of purpose, the ease of execution,--all these produce a
certain effect of beauty behind which one really cannot get to measure
length of nose, or brilliancy of the eye. This much can be said; there
was nothing in her that positively contradicted any assumption of
beauty on her part, or credit of it on the part of others. She was
very tall and very thin with small head, long neck, black eyes, and
abundant straight black hair,--for which her hair-dresser deserved
more praise than she,--good teeth of course, and a mouth that, even in
prayer, talked nothing but commands; that is about all she had _en
fait d'ornements_, as the modistes say. It may be added that she
walked as if the Reine Sainte Foy plantation extended over the whole
earth, and the soil of it were too vile for her tread.

Of course she did not buy her toilets in New Orleans. Everything was
ordered from Paris, and came as regularly through the custom-house as
the modes and robes to the mi